This paper examines the link between the clustering of long-term disadvantaged students within schools, and the attainment gap at age 11 between these disadvantaged students and the rest. The data comes from the National Pupil Database for England from 2006 to 2019. The analysis focuses on students who would go on to be officially recognised as…

The UK government is planning to increase the number of pupils attending state-funded selective grammar schools, claiming that this will assist overall standards, reduce the poverty attainment gap and so aid social mobility. Using the full 2015 cohort of pupils in England, this article shows how the pupils attending grammar schools are stratified…

The extent of between-school segregation, or clustering of disadvantaged students within schools, in England varies depending on the indicator of interest. For example, the trend over time for segregation by student poverty differs from those for ethnicity or special educational need. Additionally the causes of the level of segregation for any…

This article describes the social and economic "segregation" of students between schools in England, and the likely causes of its levels and changes over time. It involves a re-analysis of the intakes to all schools in England 1989-2011, and shows how strongly clustered the students are in particular schools. The pattern for primary-age…

This research note shows that secondary school segregation by poverty in England has recently started declining again. By comparing the long-term pattern of school compositions with an economic indicator, it is possible to link this decline to the recession, but only if a further, and contentious, assumption is made about what happened in the…

Previous international work has shown that clustering pupils with similar characteristics in particular schools yields no clear academic benefit, and can be disadvantageous both socially and personally. Understanding how and why this clustering happens, and how it may be reduced, is therefore important for policy. Yet previous work has tended to…

This study examined the extent to which introduction of educational markets changed the social composition of secondary schools in England and Wales. Using data from the introduction of the 1988 Education Reform Act onward, it measured changes in the tendency for students with different socioeconomic characteristics to cluster in particular…

Through a historical picture of school allocation and residential change, and a detailed comparison of residential and school-based social segregation over time, this paper examines the relationship between residential differentiation and school segregation in the United Kingdom, describing the extent to which introduction of market principles,…